October 16 · This Day in America
Near eleven at night, a white abolitionist named John Brown leads twenty-one men — Black and white, two of them his sons — across the bridge into Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They take the federal armory and arsenal, a hundred thousand weapons within reach. The plan is to arm the enslaved and carry a war for freedom into the mountains of the South. Frederick Douglass had warned him it was a steel trap; he went anyway. By the next afternoon U.S. Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee storm the engine house. Most of the raiders are dead or taken. Brown is tried, and on the way to the gallows hands a guard a note: that the crimes of this guilty land would not be purged but with blood. He was right within eighteen months. The raid failed in every tactical sense and lit the fuse anyway. The country could no longer look away from itself.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1995
On a single Monday, the National Mall fills with Black men — estimates run from 400,000 to over a million — called to Washington for a day about responsibility, atonement, and unity. Rosa Parks speaks. Maya Angelou recites. The crowd is vast and quiet and orderly, and in the weeks after, roughly 1.7 million Black men register to vote. Whatever one made of its organizers, the sight of that gathering, peaceful and immense, entered the country's memory of itself.
Source: www.britannica.com
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”John Brown, December 2, 1859